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tl;dr: Accessibility has always been a concern and, there is more innovation happening today than 30 years ago.

I also miss the (video game) days of my youth; learning about games from friends, or by going to an arcade and seeing what new machine was front and center...later making ANSII ads for BBS's so I could obtain a high enough credentials to get access to their warez section and learn about the latest games.

That said, I chock my emotions of those days as nostalgia and recognize an indie in the 80's/90's had a much more limited set of options than today. From middle school to college my options went from Applesoft Basic with the Beagle Bros compiler to Turbo Pascal/C++ with the XMODE library. That's it. Innovation in game design, and mechanics was regulated to a task that could be accomplished only after you figured out how to get a framebuffer up, sounds playing, and all the other nit picky things required to build a game.

Don't mistake accessibility with complexity. I make games for a living and some of my co-workers have been doing this for 30+ years; accessibility has always been at the front of the games developers build. When 4k of memory was a lot, the best games could do was have paddles, a ball, and text written on an arcade cabinet to describe how to play. Later on we introduced demo mode and how-to-play screens, which worked particularly well with most games as they didn't scroll and limited play modes and/or mechanics to demonstrate.

And when games became more complex (powerups, scrolling screens, etc...), the games people played were the ones that continued to innovate on how they were accessible. A great example that codifies this early push for accessibility by design is in "Sequelitis - Mega Man Classic vs. Mega Man X" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If games haven't always found a way to be accessible, demos, tutorials, etc... they wouldn't be played because only a handful of us die-hard geeks are willing to read through the manual. So as awesome as it was making games in 320x240 with 256 colors with my own game engine, I know what I was able to produce then pales in comparison to what an eager indie can create today.

To see this innovation just poke around Newgrounds or go to any global game jam site or just look at the entries from one of the quarterly Ludam Dare's ( http://ludumdare.com/ ). At the Game Developer's Conference this year there was a whole section of alternative input games ( http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc... ). And there are plenty of other sources showing innovation game play mechanics, some fun, some not, but plenty of experimentation.

You forgot to mention GDC next month which is certainly an important Game Developer Conference. It's not "pure" academics in the sense that most of the talks are not PhD papers being presented like SIGGRAPH (although some of the presentations are indeed PhD papers or purely academic excercises).

Most of the presentations are just a kick-ass developer with some PowerPoint slides sharing how they developed a system in their game. But nearly all the talks are from Real World Game Developers highlighting what actually worked for them.

If you're interested in going, you still have 24 hours to save a bunch of $$$ on Early Registration.

I got to play with one of these at the Game Developers Conference. It can determine if you are being "meditative" or "focused." It was kinda neat, with two limitations:
1) It didn't work at all one some people (me being on of them).
2) The company says it is useless for games.

It's funny that there is an article about this being for games, because the reps at the show said that it wasn't really useful for games, and they were instead looking into military and commercial apps. For example, using it to see if drivers are awake. Or if a pilot is in need of a stimulant. But as for games, you really can't change your mental focus while doing something else. In the demo game, the rep would move your character around for you and click on things because it wasn't realistic for the player to be in a "meditative" state while doing those things. And since the whole contraption can only measure one axis, it is a lot of complexity for very little value.

It was a nice tech demo but there was only so much that could be done with it. It is definitely not the next big thing in gaming.

The trade convention is now the Game Developers' Conference. That's where both the technical people and executives now go. Sessions like "Know Your Players: An In-Depth Look at Player Behavior and Consumer Demographics" and "10 Steps to Success in Outsourcing Contracts" are attended by suits and management level technical people. "Meeting Players Halfway: Using Adaptive Systems to Prevent Player Frustration" gets game designers. The more theoretical game programmers go to talks like "Skinning with Dual Quaternions".

GDC has replaced E3 as the working convention for the game industry. That's where you make deals. It's all pros, no fanboys.

There's also the Hollywood Games Summit, where the game industry suits meet the film industry suits. Sponsored by AFTRA, Sony, ILM, IBM, ILM, Paramount, TBS, WB, NBC, FOX... That costs $800 to attend, but they throw in subscriptions to both Game Developer and the Hollywood Reporter. Plus you get to go to the "Deal Makers Martini Reception".

So that's what really replaced E3.

Gamastura is the web front of the CMP Game Group, which is in turn part of CMP Media at large. Amongst other things, this company organizes major industry events (such GDC), and publishes Game Developer Magazine. Gamasutra is mainly a web clearinghouse (and advertisement) for Game Developer Magazine content. Thusly, there are folks with editorial control over the content published on Gamasutra; this is not a blog, where a writer says whatever they want with nobody to edit their content for public consumption.

Ian Bogost is much more than a "blogger". Judging by the derisive fashion with which you wield the term, I'm guessing you take that to mean "person who writes about stuff because they are too untalented/lazy to actually be involved with any of the stuff they write about". No offense; that is the same way I bandy the word about. Check out his website, and take a look around. Yes, it links to a lot of articles he has written, and mentions in the mass media (including an appearance on The Colbert Report), but if you take a look at these, you'll find that in addition to doing real business with corporate advertisers hawking products, he is actually in involved in trying use games for conveying something beyond a fun experience or a product placement.

No, I don't work for him, and I'm not his #1 fanboy. I simply knew that the "publisher" and the author of the content you called a "blog" were so much more than that.

The action is elsewhere. It's at the Game Developer's Conference for technology, and the Hollywood Games Summit for content.

Anyone with $799 can go to the Hollywood Games Summit. They even throw in subscriptions to both Game Developer and the Hollywood Reporter.

Tom Leonard, a programmer from Valve, gave a fascinating talk about this at GDC this year, about retrofitting multicore support into Half-Life 2 (specifically, into the Source Engine, which powers Half-Life 2). Not surprisingly, this talk was named "Dragged Kicking and Screaming" ...

There was a lot of really good wisdom in there, whether you are writing a game or something else that needs to get every possible performance boost.

I'm sure they probably drew from 20+ years worth of whitepapers (and some newer ones about "lock-free" mutexes, see chapter 1.1 of "Game Programming Gems 6"), but what I walked away from the talk with was the question: "why the hell didn't _i_ think of that?"

There were several techniques they used that, once you built a framework to support it, made parallelizing tasks dirt simple. A lot of it involves putting specific jobs onto queues and letting worker threads pick them up when they are idle, and being able to assign specific jobs to specific cores to protect your investment in CPU cache.

Most of the rest of the work is building things that don't need a result immediately, and trying to build things that can be processed without having to compete for various pieces of state...sometimes easier said than done, sure. But after hearing his talk, I was of the opinion that while parallelism is always more complex than single-threaded code, doing this well is something most developers aren't even _thinking_ about yet. In most cases, we're not even at the point where we can talk about _languages_ and _tools_, since we aren't even using the ones we have well.

--ryan.

This is just retailing. Something local to do on a boring afternoon. Like gun shows, boat shows, car shows, flea markets, etc. "Dolaher said the press conferences, keynote addresses, and big announcements that have marked previous E3s won't be present at E For All." The options on their web site are "I'm a a gamer" and "I'm an exhibitor". There's no option for people in the industry. And no reason to go there from further away than Long Beach.

If you're in the industry, you go to GDC or the Hollywood Games Summit.

The serious show in the industry is now the Game Developer's Conference. While there are a few talks that fans might like, like "Half Weasel, Half Otter, All Trouble: a Postmortem of Daxter for the Sony PSP", those are rare. Most of the content is more like "High Performance Physics Solver Design for Next Generation Consoles" or "Practical Parallax Occlusion Mapping for Highly Detailed Surface Rendering".

It's not all about programming. There's theory of gameplay: "Tomorrow's Military Shooter: Challenges in Next-Gen Wargaming", and "Fun versus Offensive - Balancing the Cultural Edge of Content for Global Games". And business issues, like "How to Outsource Art Successfully", and "Bigger AND More Creative: Building a Better Developer Through Mergers and Acquisitions".

Over the last few years, GDC has grown, moved to bigger convention centers, added business and production sessions, and has become the place where work gets done and deals get made.

Losing E3 is no great loss.

Check out the agile game development blog and in particular High Moon Studios who has provided seminars at the last two GDC's on their experience with SCRUM and XP, including tips for unit testing game components. They admit that some elements of game, for example, "fun" is not something you can tests, but since games are so hideously complex, having most of your code covered by unit testing makes regression testing far easier when your 18 months and a few 100k lines of code in.

That said, I've experienced a lot of blowback in game companies about using any agile methodologies. The rank and file in most game companies are, while blindingly talented, often very stubborn and/or passive-aggressive toward anything they perceive as control. The organizations I've been in where XP, in particular, has really worked, was where most if not all of the engineers were tired of priority of the day project management from marketing, sales, etc. and where management was enlightened about the benefits of better software quality and more predictability in development. Unfortunately, to make any agile method to work requires buy-in from the top to bottom of the org chart and very few places will ever get that.

That said, I think in 5 years, most game companies will be using elements of XP, SCRUM, and other agile methodologies in their work. I don't believe game companies will be able to survive without this shift, because although some poo-poo agile for large teams, some of these techniques can work very well for large teams and game teams are only getting larger and the financial stakes of failure and missed schedules will only becoming higher. In that environment, only studios which get a handle on their development will survive. The companies that refuse will become overwhelmed by the complexity and IMHO will start losing their best people to studios that start putting agile processes in place.

Of course, EA and that ilk may continue to just chew through developers, working them 80+ hours a week for years to come, but that will not be an option for most studios and smaller publishers.

And, yes, agile comes with a lot of marketing-speak gobbledy-gook, because you usually have to sell it to management. The reality is that it's as much about controlling management as it is about controlling development, perhaps more so.

And to the example above where XP was implemented at a game company where management thought that they would simply get more features, well, that's management not understanding XP and I'd wager that in the absence of XP those same executives would have been adding the same damned features, still not dropping any features, and still kvetching that the game needs to ship for Xmas. That's the game industry folks. No process can fix that.

LQ

Did we expand the definition of developers to include "columnist and game design lecturer" and "director of business relations?"

It's fair to call Earnest Adams a developer. Sure, he did a good chunk of his career on Madden, but there is no shame in doing a stint on serialized sports games. Plus his writing is generally insightful and at times usable in a production environment, which is a good lot more than can be said for many design lecturers. He also co founded the Independent Game Developer's Association and the Game Developer's Conference.

Did I mention he's one of the few game design writers who isn't a complete idiot? Honestly, that's the most shocking achievement.

As for the biz dev guy from highmoon studios... in a company that small, their business people are probably with it. What he says is mostly insightful, so he should be given the benefit of the doubt.

As for Gamasutra's methodology: they sent out a shotgun of e-mails and got some back. Two happened to be from "important" people at one company. They are still separate people, though.

I don't think it was mentioned in the review, but if you're wondering what GDC is (like I was), it's the Game Developers Conference.

It boggles my mind why the wouldn't have links to BANG! Howdy! or reviews of it.

Who mod this as off topic? If there's a video, it should appear on Sci-Fi or GDC, or maybe as a (free) download on iTunes.

This is the point where Sony has to make it clear to developers exactly what's coming out and when, or there will be very few games ready at launch.

So wait a week.

Consider this: Despite the fact that nobody outside of sony has even seen a game run, the PS3 gets more headline coverage than Xbox360, which can be bought today.

I guess nobody went to E3 in May of 2005 and saw the PS3 Unreal demo: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/614/614712p1.html

When it comes to PS3, You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Plenty of people outside of Sony have seen code running on a PS3. There were hundreds of developers at PS3 devcon a couple months ago and we've had PS3 devkits for months before that as well. Sony will also be showing PS3 demos and tutorials for those people going to GDC in San Jose next week. Go there and see a PS3 in action for yourself. You can still sign up at http://www.gdconf.com/

The 2005 E3 Demo info, the PS3 devcon, the release of devkits, and the upcoming GDC talks have all been publicly mentioned on a variety of game-related websites. Maybe you should check the facts before you say no one else has seen code run on the PS3.

Phil Harrison, President of SONY computer entertainment is going to deliver a keynote address at the upcoming Game Developers' Conference on March 22, titled "PS3: beyond the box"...let's hope this will probably end the silence on the console, apart from the rumored announcement on the 15th.

The indepent game developers thrive. Smaller companies are coming into the marketplace. Take a look at the Independent Games Festival

If you look at the titles you will see a lot of reasonably priced games that are great fun, though they may not be as polished as a AAA title.

A little shameless plug for company I work for: Tribal Trouble

We are an independent developer and we intend to bring fun into games again.

I may make some suggestions here that seem obvious, but if they're obvious to you, just ignore them.

I've been working in computers since 1986, in computer audio since 1993, and I know a fair number of people in the game industry.

In my experience, I have never gotten a job that was worth a damn without having contacts on the inside. Never. I have had crummy jobs that I applied for randomly, and I have had cool jobs that I got because I knew someone. Maybe this makes me lame, but I suspect it makes me typical.

Make friends in the game industry, or at least also trying to get in to the game industry. You don't even need to know them in person; this is the era of the Internet. The goal is that sooner or later they'll be in the meeting where the project manager at their game company says "Okay we're shipping in two weeks; it's time to add the music", they'll be able to say "I know this guy..."

They don't even need to be high up in their company. I started at Creative Labs working tech support. Within a few years, I had moved around in the company to marketing, and I was in the meeting where my boss said "We need someone to compose some music for our web site." We hired Paul Godwin because someone in that meeting knew him.

You have a web page up with at least snippets of some of your compositions up, right? If you can't find an open source game to help out with, turn off your PC speakers and compose some music for a game that already exists! Put 'em on your site arranged by genre: fps, rts, driving, puzzle, whatever.

In addition to a sharp looking site, you need to have some demo CDs. I bet you can make even the little business-card CDs in redbook format. I'd make 'em redbook with small song segments since you will be limited to 8-10 minutes of music. You can make them mixed-mode if you feel like, but I bet redbook with a nice printed label with your name and URL would suffice. You don't need to press them on everyone you meet, but keep them around.

If you don't already, spend some time learning about how the industry works. It may be boring and/or trite, but consider this: You meet someone who works for a publisher, and says "yeah we don't actually make any of the games ourselves." Dead end? Hardly! Maybe they don't make the games themselves, but they work with dozens of small software houses, each of which does need composers. "What titles are you publishing right now? Really, who is that by? Are you going to publish any future releases from them? You know I'd love to get in touch with someone there about composing some music for one of their titles."

Are you ready to be self-employed? Lots of small-time game operations are run on a shoestring. They're not going to need a properly-paid composer full time on staff. Get your state business license, come up with a nice looking invoice, learn how consulting contracts work.

And last, save your nickels and dimes, because next March 20-24, no matter what, you need to be here.

Best of luck.

Chris O
San Carlos, California

There are plenty of serious discussions about Python vs. Lua for game development. These two languages are easily the most popular choices (besides home-brew languages, which is pretty much an inferior choice to using something already developed like Lua or Python).

The really short version of the debate I've heard is:

1. Lua is easier to setup and integrate intially.
2. Python is a much more full fledged language, and generally better the larger the project is.

Also, in reply to your particular comments, modern Python is very good with memory management (it has added mark-and-sweep in addition to reference counting), and Python is fairly reasonable for "directly storing data". More specific to Civ4, however: Turn based games are not going to be as concerned about speed (where Lua often does win). (For instance, World of Warcraft uses Lua for the interface, and it really does need to be as fast as possible.)

Further Reading (says it better than I can).

http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusPython
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/15/ 2154222&tid=206&tid=156
http://mozart.chat.net/~jeske/Projects/ScriptPerf/
http://www.gdconf.com/archives/2004/ (search for 'Lua')
http://www.pygame.org/

In the GDC schedule it was clearly noted that it was in the Game Design Track. So if you were looking for developement information(specs) you knew it wasn't going to be there. Also they had a nice write up about it on the GDC site http://www.gdconf.com/conference/keynotes.htm.

Clearly you had enough information to judge wether or not you want to go to this session. If you didn't want to go to this session you could of also gone to the Sponsored Session "HackU: Beat the Hackers at their own game". There were plenty of things to do such as go to the Expo, IGF at the GDC and any numerous other things in San Francisco in you wanted a break from the Conference.

Everyone I talked to liked the Nintendo keynote a lot more then the Microsoft one (I couldn't get a flight to make it to the Microsoft one). I dont remember Sony having a keynote. Clearly I feel Satoru Iwata did a really great job, and I thank him dearly for giving me a good experience at the GDC.

Clearly I think you are just upset you didn't get a TV during the Nintendo Keynote.

GDC ain't free. It ain't even cheap.
http://www.gdconf.com/register/passoptions.htm

I've always personally enjoyed cooperative games more than competitive.

Waste and corruption will either be removed or at least completely reworked for Civ IV. Have a look at one of the designer's goals for Civ IV here (it's a PowerPoint presentation). It looks like it could be very good indeed.

IGDA has a pretty big presence every year at the Game Developer's Conference. Still, it's quite true that they don't have a huge amount of members. One of the reasons commonly cited for this was that the membership fee was so high, so this is a good first step.

Bruce

I encourage those who haven't already, check out the GDC. This conference has the surprises that E3 used to have, but not the booth babes. :(

Next week is SIGGRAPH its even in the same place as E3 was this year. It also has some of the surprises you used to see in these trade shows such as Comdex and E3.

At GDC 2003, Jason Rubin, head and founder of Naugthy Dog, a highly successful development studio for PS1 and PS2, delivered a speech (slides available here, audio and slides available on Gamasutra (free painless reg. req.)) on a closely related subject : improvements in graphics quality will not be sustained over the next few years, and relying on them to impress potential customers is a bad idea.

Moral : as long as gameplay, character development and story do not suck, nice graphics are of course an asset, but they're useless in case of an already shitty game...

An interesting read for those who admire the series

Doc
Google's html version

There was an interesting comment made at the recent Game Developers Conference in the Serious Games Summit. Someone was asked what would be the equivalent of the DARPA Grand Challenge as it related to game technology? The answer described a scenario that went something like this...

"You and your team walk into the DARPA director's office with a globe. You give it a spin and ask him to randomly choose a place - some country/location. You go back to your office and get working. A week later, you give him a 'game'. He runs it and finds himself 'in' that location he picked. He hears the language, sees the sites, hears the sounds, etc. He plays this for a week. Then he actually goes to that place. When he gets there, he 'knows' it already because you've really taught him."

Neat challenge idea.

Enjoy some context (not intended as a criticism). Part of the reason is demographic trends and part of the reason is financial. The ideas in the article seem to support a shift to creativity as discussed in an article with some game industry experts last year.

Reuters reports on the crisis of creativity in games 'as aging gamers' tastes increasingly shift toward sequels and games based on movies'. The supposed crisis was discussed by industry participants at the Game Developers Conference 2004. 'The gaming industry will shrink unless we start to see new games,' warned Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani. Sony's Ryoichi Hasegawa said, 'Core gamers are advancing in age and they are becoming more conservative'.

As the GDC panel sees it, the other big problem is the cost of producing games which encourages publishers and developers to 'take less risks on new, innovative titles.'

The argument for creative new games and game types echoes an article we ran last year where experts say game industry trends favor a shift to creativity and creative talent. Iwatani appears to agree, saying he had seen periods that lacked creativity in his 20-year career but 'new and revolutionary new games appear in a two- to three-year cycle.'

The Infinium Labs website, under "Special Events", says they were going to be at the Game Developers' Conference this week. I didn't see an Infinium booth there, and they're not on the exhibitor list or the booth map.

Being an employee of a major Japanese video game corporation, as an avid gamer at heart, I have myself deplored the commercialization of games, and the tendency for games to be produced "cookie cutter" style in one of several well-explored genres, and to not sell unless it has a popular movie license behind it like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, guns, and/or scantiily clad women -- even though the production values and budgets of today's games far outweigh those of before.

Yet, I do think that the enormous gains in technology on the hardware side will result in a transformation of the video game industry -- specifically breaking out of its roots in "entertainment".

Games, especially when powered by today and tomorrow's graphics hardware and multimodal I/O technology, have already been discovered by organizations such as military, fire, and police to be valuable education and training simulations. In fact, this year's GDC will have a Serious Games Summit to promote the use of game hardware and software for uses other than entertainment, for education and other uses.

At Nintendo, my research group has been heavily looking into ways to dissociate games with pure "entertainment", and have been working with the Japanese military and other groups to incorporate our hardware and software into their training, and even in their actual weapons systems.

Besides training, we are working with an unnamed Japanese automaker to explore the use of game controllers -- the product of our years of HCI research -- as an alternate control mechanism for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.

We are also working with underdeveloped nations such as China, to produce customized games such as "Super Marx Brothers" and "The Legend of Deng Xiaoping" to use as educational materials in their school systems, making their textbooks come alive.

These are just a few examples of how we in the industry are seeking to diversity, and why I feel the game industry is by far, the most exciting industry to work in today.

I've seen Zona's FPS grid game at GDC for the past couple of years. Looks like Mad Max meets Mario Carts, lots of shooting, quite impressive with low latencies. Quake Derby-ish. I got their dev kit -- they use clustering, dynamic spatial ownership, object shadow proxying. What IBM is doing is nothing new -- I think they are just goofing off.

I was in almost the exact same situation about two years ago. I graduated with degrees in both CS and Japanese and headed straight for the game industry.

Most of the important stuff has already been said, but I'll add a few more comments. First of all, you must start writing games during your free time. A GBA demo is great, but a PC demo is fine too. If you do a PC demo, your work will probably be more impressive if you minimize your reliance on 3rd party APIs like DirectX and OpenGL. On the other hand, if you can demonstrate a knack for quality game design, good AI, and/or good character handling, writing a demo in DirectX won't be detrimental.

Secondly, pick up some books (somebody mentioned the Game Programming Gems series, which are great) about game development and familiarize yourself with common methods and algorithms. This will help you at interview time when they ask you to implement A* on paper or to explain how you would write a 3D renderer on a platform that does not support floating point (like the GBA).

You've missed the Game Developers Conference this year, but if you are still looking next year it is a great place to hand our resumes and make contacts. You can apply to be a volunteer, and they'll give you full access to the conference in exchange for about 20 hours worth of work.

Finally, there is your Japanese skills. If you are interested in working in Japan as a programmer, I should warn you that you'll face lower pay, the annoying Japanese seniority system, and possibly even longer hours than here in the states. However, it can be done, even by foreigners with very little Japanese under their belt. I'd suggest checking out this article (especially the last 1/3rd or so) concerning (among other things) a professional console developer went to work for Sega in Japan. Also, Tokyopia is a great forum run by foreigners with gaming interests in Japan.

One other thing to consider: Many Japanese game companies have American offices, but most of them only localize and distribute games developed in Japan. Do you want to write code, or perform translation/localization? If your goal is code and you end up working in the States, I am sorry to say that you probably won't have many chances to use Japanese professionally.

waka

I think it might be a difference in culture. In the U.S., employers want to see people that have already done what their job description would be. This includes entry level. So people like me who want a job need to focus on getting a game done, since no one buys demos. Also, I see people on demo boards in eighth grade taking C++ and graphics courses that are taught in their public schools. Not all of them will want programming jobs, they just see demo making as another form of art.

I think the U.S. indie game community is pretty healthy, though I don't know how it is compared to the one in Europe. The GDC was last month, and there were a lot of individuals and small teams who made games for little or nothing.

That all said, a U.S. demo party would be cool.

On their "events" page, they list E3 and the Game Developer's Conference... yet they are not registered for either

(Which used to be a good, technical show but now is filled to the brim with unemployed dotcom kiddies)

Dot commies? What nonsense. It's more professional and academia oriented, that's 'coz most of the crowd there is professional graphics programmers.

And SIGGRAPH is supposed to be pretty cool these days, and now they've even started getting shows on DemoScene.

Check out the Demoscene Outreach Group which performed at this year's SIGGRAPH, cool stuff. If you hate SIGGRAPH so much, maybe you should try the GDC. In fact I'd say SIGGRAPH should become even more professional, they do not seem to be handling a lot of cool & new math stuff and techniques which a lot of European schools, like MPI for example, seem to be working on.

www.aclu.org -- True defenders of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

I think you mean "True defenders of part of our Constitution and some of the Bill of Rights."

If I were to join the ACLU, I'd have to join the NRA, too, just to avoid being seen as an anti-Second Amendment advocate. (And I'm not about to do that, because the NRA's leadership is preoccupied with the notion that the industry I work in is devoted to corrupting America's youth.)

Here's some homework for those of you who belong to the ACLU: ask your leaders why they don't have the balls to post a link to http://www.aclu.org/library/aaguns.html on the otherwise-exhaustive "Issues" list on their front page.

Take a look at this online book.

Their advice is similar to advice given to writers (that I've seen attributed to Stephen King): you learn to be a writer by writing. Lots.

Most of the people I know in the game industry who went the CS route built a portfolio of code, engines, and demos that they could show to folks that alreaady are in the game industry. Coders that want to be in the industry are legion, coders who are willing to put together a decent portfolio aren't as common.

If you're serious about it, you should probably attend industry events like the GDC, E3, and the various GDC roadtrips to network. And if I'm not mistaken, the GDC even allows you to be a volunteer to get a discounted admission fee.

As a programmer directly involved with a very popular online game, the Age of Empires series, I can tell you online gameplay with a modem connection is taken very, very seriously.

If fact... Two of our very brilliant communcations programmers, Mark Terrano and Paul Bettner are giving a presentation on this very subject at the international Game Developer's Conference next month in San Jose, CA. (Go to www.gdconf.com and check out their presentation "1600 Archers on a 28.8 modem" (Actually, I just checked the site and they don't appear to have the full schedule posted yet, and the author search just goes off into la-la land)

Anyway, the things we at Ensemble do to insure good modem play include:

* Having our 8-player dedicated testing area not only include a LAN connection, but modems on each computer. Modem based playtests are conducted using up to 8 different dial-up ISP's.

* Periodically auditing network communcations bandwidth usage over the course of an entire game to determine peak bandwidth requirments. Network packets are optimized for minimal size even before they are compressed. Our performance target is for comm usage not to ever exceed about 24K BPS of bandwidth in both directions.

* In our new 16-station playtest facility that is currently under construction, we will have a fancy phone line simulator device that allows for controlled degration of line conditions.

* Tuning the communications code to account for the types of pings geographically diverse modem users are likely to encounter. (our games can dynamically adjust the communications turn length to adapt to shifting pings).

* Showing each user, while they are playing the game, an indication of the communcation link performance to every other player. This allows people to quickly determine who is the person whose connection has just gone to crap.

* And we added in Age of Kings, the ability to save and restore a multiplayer game when someone gets disconnected or crashes.

I could go on, but I just wanted to get across that we do spend real effort on all applicable fronts to make as good an experience as possible for modem-users.

Now this is no indication of what other developers do, and other types of game may be more sensitive to ping than bandwidth.. etc.. etc.. As allways, Your mileage may vary.

-Mp

He, I visited a short lecture on the x86-64 architecture last week at the GDC, and the guy who gave it specifically noted that the lack of registers on x86 was a pain in the butt... He also hinted pretty strongly about Sledgehammer supporting SIMD-type processing on double-precision floating point numbers. Cool!

Heh. I'm always surprised when someone finds Sinistar. The point of that was to illustrate the fact that you can find patterns everwhere. Humans, by their nature, tend to look at a series of stuff and try to figure out how it all works together. We even do this on a biological level (retinal after-image, for example). Look at conspiracy theories, religion, or the "Paul is Dead" fiasco surrounding the Beatles. When it comes down to it, it's just an inkblot. We see what we want to see. So, if they want to use Matrix to get kids into philosophy, so be it. I one professor who used Star Trek for all his examples, and another who did magic tricks. Incidentally, Brian Moriarty gave an interesting talk last year along the same lines at GDC, focusing on the "Paul is dead" stuff. You can probably get transcripts via http://www.gdconf.com.

The spec's looked great at the game developers con 1999. The demo platform was looking good at E3 99. (they were using laptops with RH to monitor and reset the development platforms on the show floor.)
(FYI - word was that they didn't have enough physicists and programmers to fully take advantage of the specs sony published...I wonder how close the end PS II will be to the first published specs)

I wonder if they are still charging royalties per each GAME made. (normally console makers sell the cousoles near cost (maybe even a loss?) and make it up on the royalties. (est $8-9 USD per CD, or $23-25 USD per N64 Cartridge.) hmmm - how would they handle royalties on a Java VM CD? (assuming you could then download play tons of non-graphic intensive java games without paying additional royalties.)

Yes, it is a game. But gaming is an industry. JC must be feeling awfully bad. If this gets out to the public at large this could have an awful backlash on gaming. Here's why. There an annual conference called, no less, Game Developer Conference. Their goal is to "make games the dominant entertainment platform of the 21st century." This won't happen if the public finds out that its easy to cheat. Where's the sportmanship and integrity of games? And, then, if they find out that Open Source makes it easy to cheat, they won't play open source games. Gee, this will probably be a hot discussion at the conference in March. ESR doesn't understand how sensitive an issue this is.